Mesa 10.1 RC3 Arrives Before Final Version Next Week

The third and expected final release candidate of the Mesa 10.1 open-source 3D graphics stack is now available.

Mesa 10.1 was expected to be released yesterday, but as reported already, Mesa 10.1 has been delayed. The current hope is Mesa 10.1 can be released next Tuesday but due to many last minute patches, it was decided to go ahead with a third release candidate prior to declaring the stable release of this widely-used 3D graphics driver stack.

Mesa 10.1 brings many new features, in particular a big highlight for Nouveau and Radeon driver users is OpenGL 3.3 support. There's also performance improvements, some new OpenGL 4 extensions have been supported, and a wide variety of other work has taken place over the past three months. Read the many Mesa 10.1 articles and benchmarks on Phoronix for more details. More Mesa 10.1 benchmarks are forthcoming.

The basic Mesa 10.1 RC3 release announcement can be read on the Mesa mailing list for those interested in doing some weekend testing of the Mesa graphics stack, especially for Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau users but the VMware and Freedreno drivers have also made nice mainline progress recently.

Have any special benchmark requests for Mesa 10.1? Let us know via the forums or Phoronix on the various social networks.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.